By Robert McGreevy. Media: Dailycaller
Famous leading man and prominent climate activist Leonardo DiCaprio attended Jeff Bezos’s wedding in Venice on Friday, during which time over 90 private jets reportedly flew into the city, according to The Guardian.
Photographers captured DiCaprio, who is the United Nations Messenger of Peace for climate change and a longtime environmental activist, trying to hide his face with a ball cap as he climbed onto a boat in Venice on Friday, the same day Jeff Bezos married his now-wife Lauren Sanchez in the city.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates, television mogul Oprah Winfrey and the Kardashian/Jenner clan were among the many celebs who flew into the event on private jets, according to The Guardian.
Over 90 private jets flew into Venice for the nuptials, according to the outlet.
Protesters opposed the event, with environmental organization Greenpeace gathering in Venice’s famed St. Mark Square to unfurl a banner with Bezos’s face reading “If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more tax.”
St. Mark’s Square, like other areas of the city, is particularly prone to flooding due to Venice’s unusual infrastructure. The city is uniquely built on layers of sediment and timber piles atop over 100 different islands on a large lagoon.
Bezos, in an agreement with Venice’s Mayor Brugnaro, pledged millions of euros to Corila, an academic collective that studies Venice’s lagoon biome, according to Reuters.
The city has sunk 9 inches into that lagoon in the past 100 years. The descent “has seriously compromised the heritage and the safety of the city in relation of its small elevation above the sea,” according to researchers at UNESCO Land Subsidence International Initiative.
While researchers in part attribute the sinking to the city’s unique infrastructure, some also say rising sea levels attributable to an increase in global temperatures are also partially responsible.
“Sea level rise, particularly if this is accelerated locally by subsidence, is causing increasingly severe and widespread coastal erosion, beach retreat and marine flooding with very significant environmental and socio-economic impacts on coastal populations,” Marco Anzidei, a researcher from Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), said.
Rising sea levels have been a key concern for DiCaprio, who directed a 2016 documentary about the subject titled “Before The Flood.”
In the film he interviewed then-President Barack Obama about his decision to enter the United States into the 2015 Paris Climate Accords.
Climate change generally has been a major platform for DiCaprio. He issued a stark warning to the United Nations at the 2014 Climate Summit.
“Every week, we’re seeing new and undeniable climate events, evidence that accelerated climate change is here right now. Droughts are intensifying, our oceans are acidifying with methane plumes rising up from the ocean floor, we are seeing extreme weather events, and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melting at unprecedented rates, decades ahead of scientific projections,” he said.
In addition to his public advocacy, DiCaprio also serves on the boards of the World Wildlife Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, National Geographic’s Pristine Seas, Oceans 5, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, according to the UN.
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